I know that you are referring to the big cloud providers but there's already https://blog.macstadium.com/blog/m1-mac-minis-coming-to-macs... that racks the Minis.

Seems unlikely apple would sell their chips and also that cloud providers would buy them instead of doing the same thing apple does, and design their own.

That is what Amazon is doing with Gravitron, isn't it?

Likely never given Apple's reluctance to sell or license any of their technologies to other vendors [except in limited cases where it benefits the Apple ecosystem directly].

The datacenter is a pretty low-margin, low-volume business, and has no direct bearing on the iDevice ecosystem, which means Apple has zero interest in it (beyond their internal use).

ARM servers were already a thing and they will probably keep growing, but Apple itself will likely not be a player in that space for the foreseeable future.

The operating cost of a m1 data center would be a huge. There is no reason why Linus can’t run on the M1. But since Apache is in BigSur is Linux required?

Is that a market they're willing to go after?

Probably not, they dropped the Xserve devices a long time ago.

True, but that was a long time ago. And now they _could_ make a compelling data center device if they decided they could capture a decent part of that market.

They could take the Mac Mini concept and reconfigure it a bit like blade servers, and then offer compute clusters with better performance for much lower power levels (and heat levels) than any competitor... if they wanted.

The biggest challenge would be deciding whether to put in the macOS effort to re-establish a server tier, or (even less likely) to allow Linux on it.

In terms of stock market safety, they shouldn't bother with any of this. They now have created a big enough disruption and market growth potential in the consumer space that should give them plenty of wave to ride for years. But eventually, the momentum will slow; then whatever else they started working on a few years prior (such as this server idea) would show up just in time to blast the sails.

Is Linux required given Apache is in Big Sur?

The power efficiency is a game changer.

isnt the performance tightly coupled to macos?

Haha. MacOS is kind of an antique. The new Apple systems perform well despite macOS, not because of it.

You are correct, but I believe the parent commenter meant that M1 is useless for datacenters as long as you cannot run Linux on it.